10:25 PM POETRY
Wake me if I drift
The building was a stutter of rectangles.
A public sector ghost in a blush-coloured coat,
Worn out by the weight of too many shifts,
Two floors of concrete, standing like a note.
In a song that everyone had forgotten how to sing.
But beside it, the path was a rebellion.
Trees were so heavy with green they swallowed the sun.
A tunnel of leaves where the sky went to hide,
A secret kept from everyone.
I watched it from the window of the school bus.
Begging my sister, “Wake me if I drift.”
Because I didn’t want to miss the silence
Of a road that no one seemed to want.
Then, the winter came with its silver teeth.
And there he was — the milkman’s ghost.
Or maybe just his cycle, leaning against the cold.
A skeleton of steel, still and alone,
A nod to someone I never saw, I never used to know,
Before the story became a thing of the past,
Before I traded the trees for the ink of prose.
I didn’t notice the day I stopped looking.
The novels grew taller than the canopy outside.
And the half-hour ride became a race.
Where the baton was heavy and I had to hide
Behind textbooks and stories of someone else’s life.
I was running a relay; I see it now.
But I thought I was sprinting on a solo track.
The baton fell in the dust of that colony road.
And for years, I never even looked back.
But tonight, over dinner, the blush-coloured wall
It came flickering back through the steam of the plate.
I’m picking it up — the wood and the steel.
I’m standing again at that overgrown gate.